Writer and reviewer

Interview with Paul Beatty

While I’m talking with the poet and novelist Paul Beatty in his Amsterdam hotel, we spot another Booker Prize winner, Hilary Mantel, sailing through the lobby. Both have novels newly out in Dutch translation, and both did interviews the day before for a books program on Dutch TV. Beatty envies her interview skills, he tells me. “She has her thing all ready. She knows what she’s going to say when she goes in there.”